Using LENA to Understand Children’s Media Use: Challenges and Opportunities

• In Event: Innovative Methods for Studying Children’s Media Use in the New Digital Environment

Abstract

As the media environment of children’s homes has exploded with new mobile interactive devices, measuring children’s media use with parent report survey data has become increasingly complicated and likely inaccurate.

With developments in new technology for children have come new technologies for measuring media use. For example, LENA Pro System is a recording technology that allows researchers to collect, analyze and manage auditory data as well as a coding software that can mark, organize, and find specific audio segments. The LENA recorder is a small recording device that is worn by the participant and captures all verbal and non-verbal sound that the participant is exposed to for up to 16 continuous hours. The LENA software provides estimates of the audio environment that occurs near the child including adult words, conversational turns as well as reports of the electronic audio environment.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss an important methodological recommendation for using LENA data to appropriately interpret children’s media use environment. As seen in Figure 1, LENA software provides details of the child’s audio environment including TV and other electronic sounds. However, one key limitation of LENA software is that it selects only one code at a time. Therefore if a child is watching TV and communicating with a parent, LENA codes the time that the child is speaking as child words and not TV time. This limits the validity of examining the effect of media use on other audible interactions. Results demonstrate that LENA missed about 40% of the time that proximal media occurred and incorrectly coded media as present when it was not occurring 21% of the time. We have developed a methodology that uses LENA data to more accurately depict the media environment by focusing on the beginning and end of media time which includes the time that there were other audio features occurring. This methodology benefits from the vast amount of data collected by the LENA recording device but more accurately represents the media environment of the child.

Authors

• Alexis Lauricella, Northwestern U

• Megan Roberts, Northwestern U

• Philip Curtis, Northwestern U